"In
fact, even according to a Talmudic legend, the angels
are created - new ones in countless multitudes every
moment - so that once they have sung their hymn to God,
they stop and vanish into nothingness."

Multitude
is a new angel, or better yet the return of the "angel
of history" in an extremely modified, positivized
form; a wholly secularized and subjective angel, a Christian
worker-angel, not only prophesying the advent of a future
happy freedom, but also inexorably on the way into the
sun, "in the blinding light of clear day".[2]
The angel of Empire, which Antonio Negri and Michael
Hardt have given the name Multitude, stands for a theoretical
perspective, in which the messianic and the political
no longer point in different directions. This positive
convergence, which results in a messianic Operaism -
Multitude is the good, and Multitude will come - is
probably what causes a sense of uneasiness with this
concept, even though it does command respect, on the
other hand, that the authors have insisted on the possibility
of communism, despite so many victories of capitalism,
against the left-wing officials of sad passions. The
book touches on the rarely raised question of political
being: Why do people carry on with all those damned
actions, demos and endless discussions? Do they believe
in what they are doing? Are they not uncomfortable with
being the ones always standing there with too much,
too much conviction, too many words? Are they really
waiting for a radical change? Or do they just need something
to do, the soothingness of a recognition, and they just
happened to choose politics as their field of distinction,
discipline and home? This question is answered in "Empire"
with the militant religiosity of those who believe:
multitude as the form in which resistive subjectivity
emerges in advanced capitalism, is spontaneously communist.
It is beatified through productivity in poverty, because
"biopower and communism, cooperation and revolution
remain together in love, simplicity and also in innocence".[3]Wow.
Unbelievably religious, unbelievably fervent.

With
Benjamin, who described the most beautiful encounters
between Marxism and angels, the messianic points in
a different direction from the political. At certain
moments, the political intersects the contrary movement
of messianism, which follows the mysticism of the coming
savior, and undergoes a power, with which it heads for
the lightness of happiness, that cannot be programmed
in terms of philosophy of history.[4]
In the political, the promise of happiness is a reminder
not to confuse the rationality of progress, the development
of productive forces and discipline with emancipation.
This condition of happiness in politics, the messianic
without messianism, promises that in the midst of the
catastrophe that all goes on as before, a different
time of battle could suddenly be blown out of it. For
Benjamin, the "Angel of History"[5]
is the messenger of this actuality. He stands between
catastrophe and progress and thus also for the knowledge
that there is a connection between the two, which persists
in the sad trick of modernization, in the successful
failure of battles. What the angel stands for is that
this condition is not a closed totality. It is a trace
that refers to the line of Jewish messianism in leftist
thinking, a trace that Ágnes Heller, for example, ran
into most intensively in 1968:

"My
whole way of living, not only my belief, was waiting. To travel to Hachschara[6]
or to join the Communist Party was not messianic per se, but only linked with
messianic ideas. In 1968, though, we were faced with the definitive challenge of
acting here and now in our own life as though the messiah were already here.
Anticipation as a way of living, not as belief, that was true messianism."[7]

This
long line of messianic anticipation imported into the political is represented
in "Empire" by Christian teachers of the church, by Augustine and his
idea of the City of God, in which nomadic aliens work together to create a
common world, or by Saint Francis of Assisi, who decided to live among the poor
in the 13th century, at the beginning of early trade capitalism. The
fact that Negri and Hardt skip over the Jewish trace of the messianic without
messianism, replacing it with Christian figures and images like the secular
celebration of Pentecost, the immanent pilgrimage or the incarnation of the
multitude, is all the more astonishing, because the theoretical universalization
of Jewish experience in post-structuralist thinking, to which they repeatedly
allude in their distance to dialectics, teleology and the philosophy of history
, deals with the figure of Exodus. For Negri and Hardt, exodus is the
multitude's main form of expression: social exodus from the discipline of
Fordism and socialism, economic exodus from the impoverished zones of the world
market, anthropological exodus from the construction of the gendered, human body.
Maurice Blanchot wrote about the universalization of the Exodus as Jewish
experience in 1969:

"If
Judaism is destined to take on meaning for us, it is indeed by showing that, at
whatever time, one must be ready to set out, because to go out (to step outside)
is the exigency from which one cannot escape if one wants to maintain the
possibility of a just relation. The exigency of uprooting; the affirmation of
nomadic truth. Each time we are given a sign from Jewish man in history, it is
through the call to set out."[8]

Although
Negri and Hardt's description of the multitude as flexible and deserting borders
almost painfully on nomadism kitsch, they have turned the multitude into a
Christian angel that has become flesh and subject. In this way, the angel no
longer expresses a virtuality of time, still promising change in the face of
catastrophe, but rather a virtuality of the subject. The angel has been
unequivocated as the subject of production. His universal representative on
earth is the post-proletarian subaltern, the globalized poor person that has
left the factory, the "free-as-a-bird" / "outlawed"
(in German: vogelfrei) of the imperial
capitalist world:

"The Vogelfrei
is an angel or an intractable demon. And here, after so many attempts to
transform the poor into proletarians and proletarians into a liberation army
[...], once again in postmodernity emerges in the blinding light of clear day
the multitude, the common name of the poor. [...] the poor, every poor person,
the multitude of poor people, have eaten up and digested the multitude of
proletarians. By that fact itself the poor have become productive."[9]

This
positive view of the angel, this class struggle in angel theory, indicates a
fundamental theoretical paradox in "Empire". It consists in the way in
which the book undertakes the thoroughly fascinating attempt to bring together
Marxism, post-structuralism and an analysis of feminist economic theory,
according to which the so-called reproductive activities are also productive, at
a new level. Negri and Hardt carry out three basic operations on all the figures
of post-structuralism: positivization, productivization and subjectification -
specifically outside the realm of understanding positivity and productivity as
the distinguishing characteristics of a power that does not oppress the
conditions, but rather founds them (Foucault)[10],
or as distinguishing characteristics of a productive desiring, expressing the
constitutive line of the historical (Deleuze/Guattari)[11].

In
response to the fundamental questions of critical social
theory: What is constitutive? Why does something happen?
Why does history take place?, Negri and Hardt answer:
because the multitude fights. It is the legacy of Operaism
that over-codes their theory, the old slogan of the
workers that produce the crisis, to which capital reacts
with modernization strategies. In this way, the entire
book is torn by the paradox of introducing remainders
of a concentration on productive force and labor and
the notion of the autonomy of a mass expanded into a
class, into an a-subjective, contingent thinking of
Marxist or capitalism-theoretical post-structuralism.
Reading the book, one constantly wants to defend it
against its authors, to make use of it against its operaistic
gesture, and to radically delete the figure of autonomy
from it. For multitude is either singular, as Negri
and Hardt write in many places, or it is autonomous.
Singular means that a specific relation between things
and persons in a societal situation is materialized
in it, a specific concatenation between the economical,
the machinic, the sexual, the gendered and the psychical,
which is constituted through the motion of desiring,
in which social power is erected, institutionalized
and discursified. The potential for emancipatory change,
that which Negri and Hardt call proto-communism, accumulates
in the way of this concatenation and not in the subject.
The accessibility of knowledge about production procedures,
the self-organized desertion from the boredom of a standardized
life and the misery of the dried out deserts of the
capitalist world market, the desire to go beyond the
I-other world order on both a large and a small scale,
is a progressive social condition that has nothing to
do with autonomy.

This
condition is open to reintegration, to a functional
mobilization in an extremely differentiated capitalism
that also exploits affects and feelings as human resources,
as the productivity of style, of motivation, of the
United Colors survival culture. For Negri and Hardt,
though, multitude, which becomes visible in migration
and immaterial labor, is autonomous and thus potentially
eludes domination. It remains undamaged by the procedures
of domination. Imperial power is only effective through
encountering the resistance of the mass and being "driven
by the rebound from the resistance of the multitude
against imperial power."[12].
However, this is operaistic idealism that seeks to cleanse
advanced subjectification in capitalism from power,
dreaming of a clean, happy, proto-communist subjectivity
in contrast to a power external to it, which only functions
negatively and repressively.

This
form of argumentation takes the notion of the diagrammatic
effectivity of power found with Foucault and Deleuze
in a misleading direction. The analysis that power is
a diagrammatic arithmetic that remains external to the
condition it produces, does not mean that power remains
left out in the cold with respect to the social practices
of subjects, not even the emancipatory ones. Instead,
this analysis deals with describing a distinction between
power on the one hand and knowledge/institution on the
other. The diagram of power founds a relationship of
the non-related. It conjoins the different lines of
development of knowledge (medicine, psychology, criminal
law, pedagogy, etc.) and the institution (clinic, psychiatry,
prison, school, etc.). Power is the abstract line conjoining
the two others into a dispositive. This is the intention
of theses, to which Negri and Hardt refer in "Empire",
such as: power is a stratagem that remains external
to the dispositives. The dispositive itself, however,
permeates subjectification and all the forms of social
expression and constitutes the subject as an effect
of power.[13]

A
theory is as good as what you can do with it. And quite
a lot can be done with the theory of Empire, if the
Christian impetus, the cheerful Operaism, the shifting
of the emancipatory to an autonomous subjectivity are
peeled off again. The concept of multitude, for example,
in comparison with Slavoj Zizek's Neo-Leninism, is marked
by the political will never to fall back again behind
the critique of the avant-garde, of the cadre, of deputation
and representation. In addition, with "Empire"
one enters an analytical universe that theorizes the
further development of capitalist socialization beyond
the realm of economism at an international level. This
development is determined by an extension of the biopower
regulation, by a real subsumption of societies under
capital, and the transition from a disciplinary to a
control society. The concept of biopower[14]
is used to attempt to describe life science as a governmental
strategy. Since the 17th century, power has
turned to the administration of life at two levels,
that of the body of the population (demography, urbanism,
resources-inhabitants calculations, tables of wealth,
etc.) and that of the individual body, which is mobilized
and standardized in the institutions of humanism (clinic,
school, army, etc.) This development has coexisted from
the beginning with the emergence of capitalism. In the
process of real subsumption anticipated by Marx[15],
it is a matter of how the movement of capital eats its
way through bodies, affects, the sociality of societies
and the entire territory of the world. Marx himself
already emphasized the potency of unbounded commodities
production to universalize, break open prejudices, break
down national restraints and expand production forces
and needs in infinitum.
The theory of Empire attempts to describe an international
formation of capital that no longer recognizes any non-capitalist
outside, into which it has first colonially, then imperialistically
expanded. As the external boundaries are reached, the
internal boundaries become more flexible. The walls
of the great systems of imprisonment, from the factory
to the family, are crumbling under the double assault
of revolts and economization. Control society[16]
means that the discipline of the school or the family
goes walkabout, and the subjects become pupils outside
the school, workers outside the factory, prisoners outside
the prison.

In
"Empire" Negri and Hardt grant multitude the
capability of productively responding to all these transformations,
because they see them as the result of the struggle
of the subjects against the institutions and against
exploitation - in the sense that the revolts against
the factory discipline led to the dispersion of the
factory over the entire plane of the societal and international
territory. For them, the effrontery of so-called neo-liberalism
becomes the strength of a subjectivity that has appropriated
the knowledge of production, the organization of the
societal, the cooperation of life and feelings.

In
this way, they have only descriptively stated the problem,
the catastrophe of society stumbling from modernization
to modernization, but without being able to explain
it. They simply append it to their optimistic Operaism
- an addition of that which is evident. Their theoretical
leapfrog action is found in their division of the world
into a negative imperial government and a positive multitude.
Their messianic analysis of the possible future of immaterial
labor and autonomous migration skips too lightly over
the political condition of post-Fordist subjects that
vote for Schill, FPÖ or Forza Italia. It gives too little
weight to the dynamic of transformation, with which
Fordism ended up in a crisis in formerly colonized states,
without ever really becoming established there. As though
it were sufficient to name the violence of Empire, only
to return to the pathos of the communist multitude.
While the projects of rising industrialization, of import
substitution, the dictatorships of nation-state developments
to Fordism - followed by the real-socialist states -
are integrated into a capitalist Empire, a proto-communist
multitude that has productively appropriated the tools
and knowledge of cooperation only rarely becomes visible
in the North and South, in the huge poverty economies,
in homeworking and in the mass misery of self-entrepreneurship.
What is revealed instead is the basis for the connection
that the neo-liberal self-entrepreneurship of poor and
rich can enter into with racist, political-religious
and ethnic ideologies. This is what is missing in the
thinking of Empire: the Non-Multitude.